


Near to You

by heartstone



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Tragic Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:41:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23087176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartstone/pseuds/heartstone
Summary: In the Beginning he had been the admirable: for to him among the Maiar was a spirit nearly as great as the Valar.***
Relationships: Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor/Sauron | Mairon
Comments: 5
Kudos: 35





	Near to You

Les Litanies de Satan

(Prayer from Charles Baudelaire)

***

Glory and praise to you, O Satan, in the heights

Of Heaven where you reigned and in the depths

Of Hell where vanquished you dream in silence!

Grant that my soul may someday repose near to you

Under the Tree of Knowledge, when, over your brow,

Its branches will spread like a new Temple!

***

In the Beginning he had been the admirable: for to him among the Maiar was a spirit nearly as great as the Valar.

He stood on a tower of iron when the gold melted to black. He raised his arms above his head as the earth trembled and his fingertips, stretching up to the void of the sky, disintegrated. He imagined he was falling upwards as what was left of him fell apart, crumbling with the wind, nothing more than a sigh leaving him as he was rendered to ash. For a moment a flame could be seen flickering, a faded pitiful thing congealed with soot that blinked slowly and then curled, thin and cold, to a final exhalation.

Consciousness left him. What remained was a single glimmer with the barest of suggestions of the glory it had in its making. Only one thing was left that betrayed it as having been something other than a failing spark embedded in quivering ash— it yearned. It yearned so much that in its final instinct it chose the certainty of self-destruction to the countless years of drifting with the wind. The glimmer surged as a star that inflates itself before it collapses. For a moment there could be seen within the gold, a Beauty and an Order which surpassed any of Eru’s creations, wasted potential the sweet agony of its dying shudder.

With its final power, the smallest constituent that had once been _Mairon_ tore itself apart in its singular overwhelming instinct. It chose to go _home_ knowing it wouldn’t make it farther than the door.

It was Aulë who found him. The Valar had seen the desperation of Mairon’s last strength before he was utterly spent and they waited. But Mandos never received him.

The Great Smith stood at the universe’s edge. The stars were bright and traced their ever-parting celestial paths, forming and dying and re-forming and dying behind him as he was carried along with the expansion of Eä that would one day spread it unbearably thin. Where Eä met the Void beyond was the Door of Night, a shimmering veil that they could not pass save with the sanction of the One, given only once. He lowered his head and the tears that fell from him could be seen as comets of silver light billions of years later on Arda when it finally reached the barren earth.

The gossamer Door of Night gathered in a small hand and draped over the shoulders of the one that pressed against it, but its hem did not exist and was not breached. Instead it flowed around, nearly absorbing, nearly covering like a pall. It carried within its border-expansion the burden that clutched to it, but never closer to the Void and its single inhabitant did the Doors ever get.

There Mairon lay as once he was long ago when first he crossed that veil and entered Eä as a streak of shimming gold across the starless sky. How sublime he was then and how sublime he was now that he rested against it again! The element of aurum that had been made upon his entry collected there, a hollow gilded cast recalling his splendor before the tarnishing of grief and the slow decay of time that had splintered him to flakes of rust. No light was upon him any longer and his eyes saw nothing, the gold of his lids parted to show that there were no eyes, merely the dark emptiness of his final desire to fall into the Void that was so near.

When the Valar asked what He had seen they only ever got one answer:

_He is gone, there is nothing left._

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry.  
> ***


End file.
